Same here crash, around a week ago. I had some spare time on a weekend and had started to play my new archer+dual 1h char and it's a lot of fun. I even installed my first mod..which is just a mod to be able to call your companion to you via console command, because skyrim's AIis so bugged. Aside from the bugs, skyrim is pretty great :p

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[Hysterical]Damn I need that mod! Cause Lydia died and her body disappeared and when I respawned her via console and told her to go home, she just walked off into the wilderness! I followed her for a bit but she walks so slow and after a while she was gone and now I can't find her anymore! [/Hysterical]

U know I was gonna mary her! Now I have to mary that ugly Orc woman in Markarth + =

Haha, if you become the Thane of Solitude you will be given a companion called Jordis, who looks like a lighter blonde version of lydia and acts at least a slight bit smarter. Also, if you resurrect npcs via the console their inventory gets reset to the point when you first met them, so you shouldn't do that, but rather reload and do it over until she survives, unless you don't care what happens to the stuff inside her inventory.

Put the txt file of your companion into your skyrim folder (not data) and next time you are ingame type bat npcname into the console and npcname gets teleported to you, as far as I remember the mod. I always keep my companion alive, but there are points when she tries to follow me and gets stuck in the middle of nowhere inside some objects thanks to the stupid AI in skyrim and I am to never see her again, since she doesn't even follow when quick travelling. This mod helps with that :p

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i didn't like lydia. i sent her home immediately after she started to bug around...

last time i played through skyrim I took an archer aswell hermit. this time i took mage. i have to say, that mage in the beginning is extremely hard. your mana always runs out and you only have very less health points. but now at lv 20 after finishing the college of winterhold you're nearly invincible. it's kinda lame and gets really boring. i just cast fireballs around and the enemies die immediately. they don't even have a chance. only dragons are the only dangerous enemy for the moment. is there already a skyrim extension?

This companion call mod is currently my only mod, though a friend of mine said there's mods on the very site I sent the link from earlier, that extend skyrim by a lot. there's supposedly better spellcasting systems or something and a vast amount of additional spells as well to make magic more fun. Try checking it out

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Heh, I remember playing Oblivion as a mage. After you've reached max level in most magic skills you could just create awesome over 9000 meter AoE spells in the mage guild that raped everything within their range. Was pretty bad if you had a companion tho